3 Poison Stars ⭐️
Spicy Level: 🌶️/5

This had SOOOOOOO MUCH POTENTIAL AND I AM MAD! It could have been brilliant and great but the more I kept reading the more I felt the story was going nowhere slowly. It has all the right tropes and everything!!! The potential is sitting there on the page waiting to be used, moulded and crafted into an excellent story. It is there!!! Waiting to be tapped in... and never was...

This is a dual POV that follows Calista and Azkiel. Azkiel is the God of Death and has returned in his human form to stop a prophecy. You see 150 years ago Azkiel placed his siblings into an enchanted sleep (although he has no memory of why, he just knows he has to stop them from waking). This prophecy states that a daughter of death will wake them, so to prevent this he vows to kill her. Calista is a witch who has to hide her power because she can wield death's ethereal power - something no mortal should be able to do. Essentially she has the power to touch someone and turn them to ash. She, her sister and her best friend have a problem, since they are of age they are required to put their names up for selection for the Harvest (basically a Hunger Games Competition) to find the next elder. The issue is all but one of the contestants die, and one of their names will get chosen.

My first warning was by 4% into the book, all I had read was the glossary to explain the Gods, their powers and the worldbuilding. Now, I love complex worldbuilding, but I like to be eased into it a little slowly. This just felt like it threw you into the deep end and said "Go have fun now". Now this wouldn't have annoyed me as much if the book didn't then go and SLOWLY explain the worldbuilding while the story evolved, making that glossary redundant.

Now, typically when I read an ARC, I do not let grammatical errors and issues with the spelling and grammar impact my reviews. However, there were so many instances of pronoun switching where she became he's and he's became she's that it became very difficult to follow along with the story. I had to read over multiple lines to try and figure out which character was actually being referred to, who they were, what their gender was or what their gender should have been in the text. So that just felt a little bit unclean and unpolished.

The other issue that I have with this is while I can deal with some poetical purple prose, there is a LIMIT. There was so much metaphorical and psychological processing in these characters' minds as they thought, felt and touched things. But it sometimes felt very overwhelmingly bulky in places and oftentimes would lead us in circles because they would be thinking the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Azkiel would constantly think about how he needs to stop his siblings from waking, how he has no siphoning power on the Island, how he cannot stand Calista but is so magnetically drawn to her and about the God Eater. Calista would constantly think about protecting her sister and Drake, how she needs to stop the Harvest from happening, how archaic the Harvest is... Like I GOT IT THE FIRST TIME - I did not need it mentioned 50 times after that. This caused two problems, one I was getting really irritated and annoyed at the repetition and second - that the plot moved at a snail's pace because the characters were stuck in their thoughts for so long! There was literally an instance of 2 pages of an internal monologue between 2 lines of spoken dialogue. NO-ONE THINKS THAT MUCH - EVEN IF YOU ARE BATTLING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS!

But this is exactly why I say this book has so much potential, because if those two things were cleaned up - the pronouns and repetition this would have been excellent because the plot itself is actually pretty good, and was the one thing that kept me moving forward.

The tropes in this are literally my catnip tropes, and I so so wanted the story to be great because it had everything in it that I love and adore. But I just kept being drawn out of the story, and for a lot of it, it felt like it wasn't going anywhere.

I really liked the connection that Calista and Azkiel had between each other. They are both starved of some sort of love, touch or affection - both being rejected and ostracized by their family. They crave touch and with their magnetic attraction to each other, it felt like they found the missing puzzle piece that was missing from their lives.

Calista as a character is sometimes a little whiney and annoying at times because she feels overly confident in her ability to do things but time and time again in the story we are shown how she cannot cope and is not as good as she perceives herself to be. Azkiel has this air about him that he is this big all-powerful badass and that people should fear him, but he is all bark and no bite - because you never actually see this personality on the page (you are just told about it). His attraction to Calista verges on hate lust/instalust and throughout the book he just becomes whiney, spoilt, selfish and angry.

I also didn't like the constant use of "faded into darkness" as a plot device. Almost every action scene would end with someone fainting or falling asleep, meaning you are told the aftermath of what happened and never shown this in action. Now I don't really like tell don't show books because it makes me feel like it manipulates me into forming ideas and opinions of how the story should be and not how it actually is. It also just felt like too easy a plot device to skip scenes and pass the time.

I also found the love triangle annoying and the portrayal of Calista's sister strange. We are told constantly that she is seen as weak and gentle and unable to do anything, but again we were just told she was weak and had to believe she was weak. But on page, she seems pretty competent (except for one part which...seriously).

I also kind of called what was going to happen in my mind about 30% into the book, so I didn't feel like it was too much of a big shock when it was actually revealed.

Tropes in this include:
▶ Death Personification
▶ Dual POV
▶ Witches and Gods
▶ Enemies to Lovers
▶ Touch Her You Die
▶ Deadly Competition
▶ Lost Memory
▶ Slow Burn
▶ Love Triangle

▶ Reincarnation
▶ I will burn the world for you

But all that aside, the plot still intrigued me. The story still intrigued me, and I am invested enough in the story and interested enough in the story that I will definitely be picking up the sequel. Most of my issues are related to polish, and so I say take this review with a pinch of salt because I read an ARC and these things can still be edited out and fixed in the final version.

Thank you to Rebecca L. Garcia for my gifted ARC copy! All thoughts and opinions are my own.